Digitalization has been a goal companies in the oil and gas industry have been inching toward for years, but the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic may serve to advance that goal at a much faster pace than previously expected.
Before the pandemic forced companies to rapidly accelerate their digital transformation efforts, many digitalization use cases were purely hypothetical. Now, according to panelists participating in a recent Downstream Virtual Conference and Exhibition webinar, those use cases have been put to the test. For example, companies were tasked with setting up the infrastructure for having a large portion of their workforce work remotely -- a change no company could have anticipated even just a year ago.
"Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, I'm not sure we had the capability to adjust the way we were working in such a rapid way," said Mark Wyszynski, senior IT advisor to projects and engineering at Shell. "But we did have the ability to respond to the changing circumstances. In returning to sites and starting projects back up, we had the ability to install infrared cameras to measure people's temperatures, and we could tell where crowds were gathering because of transportation issues.
Mark Wysznski of Shell, left, and Lloyd Colgrove of DOW participate in a webinar panel at the Downstream Virtual Conference and Exhibition.
"This allowed us to ramp construction back up, whereas before the wide availability of data, we would've had to do that manually and it would have been virtually impossible."
That next step in the "data revolution" will involve AI, automation and big data working together to provide employees with remote access to the data they would normally have to retrieve on-site, potentially enabling a significant portion of the workforce to continue working remotely long-term.
According to Wyszynski, the COVID-19 pandemic has showed that digitalization is not as far off on the horizon as many companies believed.
"The biggest thing is the credibility IT organizations built throughout this COVID- 19 crisis," Wyszynski said. "We've realized that all of the tools are available, and they worked, much to many people's pleasant surprise. The cloud services that allow us to access data, as well as the Industrial Internet of Things, actually allow us to see into our plants even when we're not in the control room. It's been remarkable. We've actually proven that it can be done."
After it became clear the necessary tools were available, Wyszynski continued, many companies became much more actively interested in increasing their digitalization efforts so their employees could do even more remotely. One potential benefit of this increased investment in digitalization is the substantial decrease in HS&E risk that comes with sending fewer people to physical sites.
"A good example is the integration of various electronic platforms we knew there was a use case for," Wyszynski said. "It was theoretical six or eight months ago, and now the interest in integrating those systems so we can get a consolidated project report has really come alive.
"We've been using a number of different tools to bring those things together and display a dashboard for a project. It's similar to stitching together 3-D and 4-D models in construction with systems that use AI to monitor progress because we don't want to send people out to sites."
While the pathway to digitalization may be easier to traverse post-pandemic, it is still crucial to get the right information in front of the right people to have any great ideas related to digital transformation survive and grow in a company.
"The objective is to get the right information in front of the right people to make better decisions, and hopefully that will make decisions happen faster," said Lloyd Colgrove, data services director and fundamental problem solving director for Dow's Analytic Technology Center, who moderated the discussion.
